As it preps Oracle Enterprise Manager to run private clouds, Oracle has released an update to the management software that offers the ability for organizations to offer production-ready databases as a service.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c release 4 is the first version of the software to “offer enterprise-grade databases as a service with high availability and disaster recovery,” said Dan Koloski, senior director of product management for the Oracle Enterprise Manager line of software. “We want our customers consume their databases in an agile environment.”

The new release also offers advancements in managing middleware and in access control.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is aimed at managing large deployments of hardware and software, both from Oracle and other vendors. With the Enterprise Manager 12c release in 2011, Oracle built in tools to deploy, meter, manage and optimize private clouds within the enterprise. The software provides an API (application programming interface)-based service catalogue that would allow an organization’s business units to easily provision database, middleware and infrastructure services.

With the new release, the company has improved the process for deploying the Oracle 12C database through Oracle Enterprise Manager. The software can orchestrate the setup of the new database, and can roll back changes should the installation fail. The software can also diagnose problems and potential issues.

The company also offers a rapid start kit, which automates Oracle’s best practices for setting up database services that can be provisioned by users. If an organization’s IT department wants to provide such services, “we can give you the best knowledge about the optimal way of doing that setup,” Koloski said.

The software also provides an updated overview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c, the latest edition of Oracle’s enterprise Java application support software. The updated software provides the capability to diagnose potential issues within a Java virtual machine. Administrators can also provision middleware according to a service oriented architecture (SOA).

Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 comes with a number of other features as well. The software can now recognize roles and credentials assigned to users, allowing for more fine-grained access control. System security is now handled by a single console.

This release is also the first version of the software that supports version 3 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), the protocol for managing network devices. The latest version of SNMP supports encryption.

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